Cumulus Networks Funding Tops $129M

Cumulus Networks announced on Jan. 23 that it had raised a new Series D round of funding, bringing in $43 million.

The new funding round was led by Telstra Ventures and included that participation of Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Total funding to date for the company is $129 million.

EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet has been closely tracking Cumulus Networks since it first emerged from stealth in June 2013.

The early promise of Cumulus Networks was the company's Cumulus Linux network operating system that was set to help enable a new era of white-box networking. In a 2013 interview with EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet, Cumulus Networks co-founder JR Rivers said that white-box networking gear has always been a half-myth, but what Cumulus is doing is turning the myth into reality.

Over the last four and a half years, Cumulus has lived up to the promise that Rivers made and has played a pivotal role in enabling the white-box networking revolution, both with its own products as well as with its participation in the Open Compute Project (OCP).

While Cumulus started off as a software-only vendor, In June 2017 the company added its first hardware products, including multiple top-of-rack switches. In 2017, Cumulus also added to its product offerings its NetQ telemetry product, as well as the Cumulus in the Cloud offering for testing network design.

Cumulus now claims to have more than 800 customers for its products, with 350 new customers signed up in 2017 alone.

"There's a striking variety in our customer base, which ranges from large financial and healthcare institutions, to breakout SaaS stars, to some of the world’s largest Internet companies," Josh Leslie, CEO of Cumulus Networks, stated. "But the common thread running through them is that they are challenging the status quo of networking in their organizations and reaping huge operational benefits as a result."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.